The Two Months of Christmas

Look around you, 'tis the season to be jolly, isn’t it? Of course it’s not. It’s the beginning of November.

Santa hasn’t even started his lunges, the elves are still waiting on the DPD delivery of tools (will be with you between 6:00am and 18:00pm). The first chime of ‘All I Want For Christmas’ has yet to cheese grate our senses into submission.

But the lights are strung out along Oxford Street, as well as local high streets. There is a box of Quality Streets in my café, who have started spraying holly and snowmen on the window, and the adverts; the adverts are out.

I love Christmas. The time of year for tarting the house up, and despite the dark nights, the lights twinkling in shop windows are comforting. The smell of mulled wine, which I wouldn’t drink if you paid me, is another. This is all well and good for me, but not everyone.
To record thousands of others (God only knows how many more in unofficial capacity), it’s the start of the worst time of the year. Financial woes. Loss of family. Homelessness. A sense of isolation. Forced fun.

Christmas represents the worst of the worst. The insistence of family centric gatherings and the magnified consumerism permeate increasingly earlier, which isn’t a new thing, it just feels earlier with every passing year. With two young children, one of which happens to have her birthday the week before Christmas Day, the burden is real.

The word fatigue is common. We’re fatigued by war, politics, and disaster. By screens. By meetings. We’re fatigued by not enough work, or too much work. Fatigued by working until falling asleep.

We’re fatigued, ironically, by that which won’t get fatigued, nor stopped being talked about; AI.

I’m venturing very much into a back in my day territory but sod it; back in my day Christmas wasn’t a two month business. For many the decorations went up when school finished, and came down a day or two into the new year. For others it was strictly the twelve days of Christmas. I also miss the excitement of what films were going to be on TV. Now we’ve access to pretty much every film ever made, whenever we want, that has fallen by the wayside. Not sure I give too much of a toss about what is Number One at Christmas, it’ll always be ‘Stay Now’ by East17 forever and always.

We, in advertising, look forward to the Christmas campaigns, but every single person I talk to who works on them feels like a husk by the time actual Christmas rolls around. Not the hours, although insane, the expectation; nobody wants to be a Christmas turkey (I’m not even remotely sorry for invoking a turkey reference, just be grateful I won’t be mentioning baubles). To work on something for nigh on a year, only to have someone make disparaging comments can hit harder than any other project worked on.

This won’t happen because it’s too late, but I would love it if next year the ads, the lights and the ‘book your table’ started much closer to, you know, actual Christmas. Maybe that way by the time it comes around we won’t all feel like it’s been Christmas for a long, long time, and those for whom it is a time of year to dread, they’ll be spared the extra anxiety riddled weeks.